4 ms·

'Theocracy of Hackers' Rules Autodesk Inc., A Strangely Run Firm

24 points by prakash 18y ago

rbanffy 18y ago
Maybe a "Theocracy of Hackers" is what you call a meritocracy you can't really understand. Not to say Walker is not... quirky. But a tech company loses a lot when it's not driven by hackers.
- prakash 18y ago
  It also loses a lot when the founders & the core move on to other things.
krschultz 18y ago
"Most profitable company among the 2,000 surveyed". CAD/CAE is so ripe for open source competition it is not even funny.
zandorg 18y ago
There's a certain irony when you consider that Xanadu (funded by Autodesk) could have been the entire Web, now she's picking up scraps of that in Yahoo.
- bayareaguy 18y ago
  Ted Nelson's Xanadu is amazing in that its ideas predate the internet (timesharing systems where the "new thing" then). Unfortunately Nelson made it far too complicated and constraining for anyone to ever put to practical use[1]. In some ways I think Autodesk's funding may have hurt more than it helped because it allowed him to continue working in an environment free from the feedback of an actual user community. Tim Berners-Lee's genius is that he took the good ideas of Xanadu and other systems that made sense in the context of the internet, released something early that his users could actually use and more often then not focused on addressing their actual concerns instead of his own imagined ones. [1] - Xanadu Original 17 rules: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rule...
dominik 18y ago
"This article was published on May 28, 1992."
igorhvr 18y ago
This article is an absolute piece of crap. You can read John Walker's own rebuttal here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/section2_99_4.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/section2_99_4.html
- prakash 18y ago
  good find. thanks!
iamelgringo 18y ago
I know that article was over 15 years old, but there I'm sure there's still remnants of the Hackocracy. The scripting language for AutoCAD program remains a dialect of Lisp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP

24 points by prakash 18y ago

Maybe a "Theocracy of Hackers" is what you call a meritocracy you can't really understand. Not to say Walker is not... quirky. But a tech company loses a lot when it's not driven by hackers.

prakash 18y ago
It also loses a lot when the founders & the core move on to other things.

krschultz 18y ago

"Most profitable company among the 2,000 surveyed". CAD/CAE is so ripe for open source competition it is not even funny.

zandorg 18y ago

There's a certain irony when you consider that Xanadu (funded by Autodesk) could have been the entire Web, now she's picking up scraps of that in Yahoo.

bayareaguy 18y ago
Ted Nelson's Xanadu is amazing in that its ideas predate the internet (timesharing systems where the "new thing" then). Unfortunately Nelson made it far too complicated and constraining for anyone to ever put to practical use[1]. In some ways I think Autodesk's funding may have hurt more than it helped because it allowed him to continue working in an environment free from the feedback of an actual user community. Tim Berners-Lee's genius is that he took the good ideas of Xanadu and other systems that made sense in the context of the internet, released something early that his users could actually use and more often then not focused on addressing their actual concerns instead of his own imagined ones. [1] - Xanadu Original 17 rules: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rule...

dominik 18y ago

"This article was published on May 28, 1992."

igorhvr 18y ago

This article is an absolute piece of crap. You can read John Walker's own rebuttal here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/section2_99_4.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/section2_99_4.html

prakash 18y ago
good find. thanks!

iamelgringo 18y ago

I know that article was over 15 years old, but there I'm sure there's still remnants of the Hackocracy. The scripting language for AutoCAD program remains a dialect of Lisp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP